Mary Katrantzou : From the Balkans to the stars

When Mary Katrantzou told me that she was thinking about Time of the Gypsies, I thought how apposite that seemed, since the 1988 film following a telekinetic Romani boy through Sarajevo and Milan is a benchmark of how things stood before the region was torn apart by conflict.

That film
has been the inspiration for many fashion shows, and I sat down expecting a
wild spectacle of colour and pattern.

"But
it didn't turn out like that," said Katrantzou, who was only five years
old when the film was made.

What did I
see instead? Colour, pattern and a deep creative process had compacted her
initial inspiration into dense but wearable clothes - far from the more
conceptual pieces of her previous season combining Victoriana and technology.

"I
took different elements from Balkan wedding clothes and pieces from
Mediterranean countries," said the designer, as she continued our
conversation by describing a move into cosmology as inspiration.

"All
the prints are based around really intricate motifs from this amazing
nineteenth-century engraving that depicts the world flat and the stars built
into the sea," Mary said.

It is a
privilege to learn about her internal inspiration and a joy when the result is
so good: those stars breaking into patterns as if on to the ocean's surface -
but all of that compressed into a shapely, short dress.

The
simplicity of the silhouette did not limit Katrantzou's expression, because the
decoration was so dense, each outfit a work of loving hands. And that meant
cobweb-fine knitwear as well as intense mixes of fabrics.

The Balkan
reference was to jackets traditionally worn by the groom, which came through as
twisted tailoring incorporated into the silhouette.

The fashion
miracle of the collection was that the clothes all seemed so streamlined and
wearable, however Mary's magpie, gypsy mind may have travelled.